Turkish police disperse election protestors

Riot police use water cannon to disperse protesters outside the Supreme Electoral Council (YSK) in Ankara. (Reuters)

     

By Staff writer | Al Arabiya News
Tuesday, 1 April 2014

Turkish riot police fired a water cannon to disperse more than one thousand protestors outside the Supreme Electoral Council (YSK) in the capital Ankara on Tuesday.
The protestors were demonstrating against the results of local elections, in which the ruling party of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan dominated the electoral map, and calling for a recount of Ankara’s results, Reuters reported.
The protestors chanted “Thief Tayyip!” and “YSK, the people are with you!” before police forces clamped down on the crowd, according to Reuters.
The AK Party maintained control of Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey’s two largest cities, in Sunday’s elections, despite the recent corruption scandal that plagued the party.
The opposition said it will contest some of the electoral results, citing “irregularities,” AFP reported.

‘Fraud’

Meanwhile, opposition supporters, mainly students who were notified through social media, filled the basement of the main opposition CHP headquarters as they searched through result sheets for signs of fraud.
“Whatever the election results are, it will unfortunately go down in the history of our democracy as a dubious election,” the CHP’s defeated mayoral candidate in Istanbul, Mustafa Sarigul, told a news conference.
“The theft of a single vote is a black mark for democracy,” he added.
Official results have not yet been announced, but a tally published by Turkish local media said the ruling AK Party received around 44 percent of the cross-country vote, while the opposition CHP received around 26-28 percent only.
The CHP opposition party, considered a stronghold of the secularist elite, failed relate to the socially conservative Muslim nation of 77 million people, and only managed to raise its share of the national vote slightly.
The CHP is challenging results in Ankara, the southern coastal city of Antalya, and calling for a recount of votes in Istanbul.

The YSK said it will not announce final, official, election results until all claims of irregularities are resolved, a process that could take weeks as the CHP filed 800,000 complaints in Ankara alone, according to the Turkey-based Hurriyet daily.
The complaints in Ankara are four times the challenges nationwide seen during the last local elections in 2009.
(With Reuters and AFP)